I found this in the Southwark News, Thursday 12 May 2005.
It should be of special interest to NF members as they are quite popular amongst the youngsters of the area.

Sorry for the lack of a Web-link.

Quote:

ROTHERHITHE TURF WAR ESCALATES.

YOUTHS WANT TO ARM THEMSELVES.
POLICE DRAFT IN EXTRA MANPOWER.

Rotherhithe youngsters caught in the middle of an apparent turf war between teenaged gangs have asked local police if they can arm themselves for protection.
The requests follow a dramatic rise in violent street crime in the area, attributed to the arrival of gangs of youths from Deptford and reprisals from gangs in Bermondsey.
Five muggings were reported on Sunday May 1; a further five were reported last Thursday.

Each set of attacks occurred in quick succession; victims reported gangs of predominately black youths on bicycles carrying out the muggings in a practice known as steaming.

Last weekend the Met responded with a massive police operation on the peninsula, and the local safer neighbourhoods’ team was joined by Southwarks robbery squad, plain clothed police officers, dog handlers, motorcycles and support police.
Police believe the gangs are arriving from the Pepys estate in Deptford and their suspicions were apparently confirmed this week when a youth described as a “known Deptford street robber” was arrested on suspicion of another offence, riding a bicycle stolen in an attack in Rotherhithe.

“They are coming around the area looking for the older lot,” said one teenager from Canada water. ”They are on pedal bikes and they are carrying bats, knives, everything. If any younger kids are in their way they are mugging those kids as well.”

At noon on Sunday, May 1, a four-teen year old girl was walking with two friends from Surrey Quays shopping centre to meet her mother at Canada Water Station.
They were accosted by a handful of teenagers, apparently part of a gang of 15-20 youths then in the car park.
One youth reportedly kicked her in the chest, knocking her to the ground. Another rode his bike over her hair, pinning her. Her two friends fled, but as the gang punched the young girl and robbed her of her coat, her mobile phone and a tiffany’s necklace, the boy returned to confront them.
“He told them to hit him instead,” said one local resident, a friend of the victim. “The youth gang took him on and beat him up and he was later treated in hospital.”

Other residents have reported gangs of youths, sometimes armed, targeting young girls in Rotherhithe and Surrey Quays for mobile phones and jewelry.
Youngsters in Rotherhithe this week claimed that gangs of youths from Bermondsey estates had carried out reprisal attacks.
“Its people from the Four squares, the Dickens Estate, and estates round the Blue, Southwark Park Road,” said one teenager, who did not want to be named. “They had a fight with these Deptford boys. Then the Deptford boys think it’s us.”

PC Richard Skinner from Rotherhithe’s safer neighbourhoods team told the `News`: “We have kids coming up to us and asking on the legality of, and how to arm themselves. Obviously they can’t, but it’s certainly as a result of these incidents.”

All the robberies are now being investigated: police hope to identify the culprits using photos of known Lewisham street robbers. PC Skinner expects arrests to follow.

On Friday Rotherhithe’s Police, swelled by the Mets territorial Support Group, Southwarks Robbery Squad and traffic officers, invoked a section 60, allowing them to stop and search for weapons. “That order was on hold on Saturday but wasn’t needed,” said PC Skinner, “To the best of my knowledge we haven’t had a spate of it since.”

This week many local parents were telling their children to avoid certain areas in Downtown and Surrey Quays.
Meanwhile a `Rotherhithe Young Crime Watcher` scheme was launched by local residents last weekend in a bid to encourage young people to report further incidents to the police.

England star Sol Campbell’s brother must wait to see if he will be jailed for breaking a man's jaw after his sentencing was adjourned today.

John Campbell was convicted of causing grievous bodily harm to a Spurs fan who spread rumours about the Arsenal defender being gay.

Campbell, 35, left Mark Golstein with four broken teeth and needing surgery after kicking him unconscious during a football training session.

The powerfully-built defendant, who was wearing football boots, continued to kick the 26-year-old student repeatedly in the head after he had lost consciousness and only stopped when he was physically restrained.

Mr Golstein was left with stud prints on his head and knee and needed to drink through a straw following the attack at an evening kick-about at Clapton Football Club, east London, on February 26 last year.

After a 16-year-old white girl was abducted, injected with heroin, gang raped, tortured with lighted cigarettes, and then stabbed to death in Reading, England last Friday, British police, on the information of several eyewitnesses, sought half a dozen men of “mixed race, white, or African-Caribbean” origin. While ranking British policemen, politicians, and press czars sweated over the possibility that the details of the crime might stoke “nativism,” “racism,” or “xenophobia” among the indigenous population, their underlings swotted to leak or to suppress information that might defuse the situation. Thus lurid details were let slip about the wayward life of the teenage victim, Maryann Lenaghan, who used drugs and consorted with a “bad crowd,” while Lenaghan was never explicitly identified as white in media reports—matters that are reported quite differently when whites are said to be the perpetrators in a possible “hate crime.” British police have now arrested eight persons for the murder, but so far none has been identified by race in any news report, in line with what is evidently standing policy in denying or minimizing minority racial attacks on whites in Britain (see “Asian Gang Murder of White Teen Roils Glasgow,” TOH, March 19, 2004). Instead, police and press are characterizing the suspects as “Londoners,” which, while it may chance feeding antipathies between the metropolis and the countryside, withholds from British voters news relevant their country’s race and immigration problem, and denies their children a lesson on the wages of minority sin.